Experience Analytics

Just a few days ago, I receive notice from Instagram that they were accelerating the shutdown of the bulk of their API features, including posting on user’s behalf, searching for results and subscribing to updates from particular users. Ostensibly this is to cut down on using these tools for nefarious reasons as Instagram’s parent company, Facebook, continues to reel from the impact of Cambridge Analytica using FB data to target US citizens with propaganda and potentially impact the election. There have been cries from users to move off Facebook, delete their profiles, and move their peeps to another network. Most famously, Will Ferrell has deleted his account. A corporate alumni group I am a member if is considering moving to Slack. For most everyone else, it is business as usual on the world’s largest social network. Mainly because the consumer privacy frogs have been boiled to death. Most consumers do not realize that when they use Facebook or other social network accounts to log in to new websites, they are sharing their entire social graph with that site. That is how Cambridge Analytica, buying data through a Cambridge researcher and other channels, was able to capture the details of 87 million Americans. Most users do not know what they are signing up for, how their data is being used, and click through privacy updates faster than Las Vegas retirees at penny slots.

Only a few consumers have jumped out of the hot water social networks have gotten them into. Our collective frogs are being boiled.

What we see on the backend, where the social sausage is made, is that firms like Instagram and Twitter are changing what data people can get access to as the horror of what is possible is moving from the dark web to public headlines. Twitter, a few weeks ago, started shutting down so called “TweetDeckers,” accounts that build and maintain a captured set of followers to artificially amplify their message across that social network. Facebook moved their public search api behind their firewall and provided curated access through data provider Datasift a few years ago, mixing public and private in a way so that marketers could target ads more broadly but have less access to the details of who they are targeting.

What we have not yet seen from these firms is more transparency to their users as to what is going on. Twitter did not market the fake influencers on their network as Tweetdeckers, they just suspended their accounts, most only temporarily. Many of these offenders just opened new accounts, both to continue their operations as usual and to complain to their tribe of followers (mostly bots) that they were wronged by Twitter. Our own analysis at Argus Insights found that most of the content in B2B discussions on Twitter are published by compromised accounts. In the Internet of Things market alone, 75% of the content published is from accounts compromised in some way, yet we see nothing from Twitter to help sort the wheat from the chaff. Spammers use Twitter’s API to drop in latitude and longitude information to boost their discovery in local search results. (It is hilarious to see Tweets published from the geographic center of Palo Alto, evidently published from a phone located inside the concrete walls of one of the buildings there).

It’s an arms race, I know, trying to keep up with how people will leverage tools for both good and evil. By the very nature of Silicon Valley, we want to build more tools, more API’s to share even more data, because that level of transparency is good, right? If plutonium can be used to craft weapons of mass destruction, social data can be used to build and deploy weapons of mass disruption. And here’s the thing, just like arms dealers making bank selling weapons to both sides of battles in small African countries, the social networks make their quarters (fiscal and literal) by the volume of advertising running on their platforms. I do not begrudge these firms making benjamins on my eyeballs. I understand they are turning my social capital into financial capital. But as a buyer of advertising, I want to make sure I get what I pay for.

Imagine if CBS Interactive charged billboard advertisers for space for the 101 freeway in Silicon Valley based on the number of chickens making their way from LA to Napa? Chickens have eyeballs, they are the target market since they are on the freeway in Silicon Valley. Why should Chipotle or Saleforce.com cry foul if CBS Interactive charges a premium for reaching an tract 30 million eyeballs a month? This is the equivalent of the debacle we call social advertising today. I had a client whose ad campaign netted over 43,000 new followers for their account. Of those new followers, less than 200 had participated in their market in the last six months. They paid good money to reach prospects, not chickens, which is what they got instead. The social firms can maintain and grow their business if they do a better job of ensuring the quality of their networks, and provide metrics beyond fake followers and fake reach.

And tell their users how their data is being used. Make it transparent how the data is being used to target users to the mutual benefit to advertises, the platform and users. We watch TV, we know need to see ads. Heck, we watch the Superbowl because of the ads! We read the paper, we see ads, we search in Google, we see ads. We know we pay for things with our attention.

In summary….

Social networks are working behind the scenes to make it harder to misuse their data and tool but will always fall behind the arms race of nefarious actors peddling influence

Consumers have had their privacy concerns boiled out of them but still need to be made away (in simple language) the impact of their actions

Advertisers should demand higher quality targeting of people, not chickens along with better metrics of success or failure of campaigns

Someone has or will recommend that Blockchain and/or Artificial Intelligence will solve all of these problems if you just gave them enough funding…

Ahead of the news from Facebook on Cambridge Analytica abusing the data of American citizens, Twitter started suspending accounts for a practice called Tweetdecking, where accounts would solicit and at times pay for accounts to artificially boost their classic influence metrics of reach and followers. Over the weekend of 18 March, some of the Internet of Things most prolific influencers were also suspended, at least for a while. Many of them are back on the Twitter-waves, pushing content like before but the artificial amplification they received by Tweetdecking has diminished to mortal levels.

At Argus Insights, we have been doing our own analysis of the rampant pay to post shenanigans in the various B2B markets we track. I first identified the issue when we saw Brocade jump in 2015 after a product announcement. Our client at the time, HPE, was concerned about the amount of attention that Brocade was getting for their announcement of offering free Network Functional Virtualization solutions. We dug into the data, initially by hand, and found the bulk of the lift Brocade demonstrated came from two sources, their own employees (Corporate Narcississm) and what appeared to be bot accounts from Saudi Arabia, tweets from people that had no interest in the telecom space, based on their past social engagements. In short, someone, maybe Brocade, maybe their agency, or someone else, was paying to push their message out, inflate their metrics and give the perception that the whole market cared about their announcement. Turns out the market didn’t care. Without the bots and employees boosting the interest, the chatter around Brocade died down to normal levels almost the next day.

We had a client looking to boost their followers (the boss challenged them to beat his follower count in a few weeks) and ignored our advice to build their following organically. They instead spent money on Twitter ads and saw their followers go from 92 to over 40,ooo in just a few weeks. The boss cried foul and asked them to prove these were real followers. They came back to Argus Insights, hat in hand, and asked if we could help. By looking at which of their followers had actively participated in the market (NFV) in the last six months, we could say which of their 40k followers were likely to be real. It was only 271. Of over 40k followers they had grabbed with their ad campaign, less than 1% mattered to their business. The client started managing to their True Followers metric instead and saw their authentic influence grow, even as their overall follower count dropped.

But not everyone that participates in a market is part of that market. In November of 2017, after being frustrated with the amount of poor content that was topping the charts of our analysis within IoT, I developed some metrics to gauge whether an account fit into a few different categories. Were they a brand, pushing out content mostly from a single domain with a good level of active dialogue with the rest of market? Were they a broadcaster, just sharing content from others? We also identified content farms, accounts that tend to talk about themselves a lot and retweet content of their clients. The most nefarious type were the compromised accounts. These accounts are basically owned by content farms and seek only to artificially boost their ‘influence’ in the marketplace.

Once we had applied this account types, we found that over 75% of all IoT content was published by the compromised accounts. This means that 3 out of 4 tweets about a multi-billion dollar market are not authentic and serve only to misguide and misdirect the 25% of the content that is more likely legitimate.

It gets worse. One of the most prolific IoT influencers pushed out almost 700 tweets, over 10% were self promotion, a clear sign of a content farm. More nefarious is that of his thousands of retweets, 85%, eighty-five percent, came from the aforementioned compromised accounts. This means that only 15% of his “influence” is legitimate. This means his clients that rely on his reach to bolster their own market awareness are paying to push content to compromised accounts. Not customers, not influencers, not thought leaders, but accounts owned by others whose sole purpose is to buy and sell attention from others.

B2B marketing on Twitter is broken. Broken by those that would game the system and misrepresent their own influence. Broken by those firms that pay for influence rather than earning it. Broken for those who see Twitter as a source of what is happening in their market. Broken for those looking to see what trends are driving their markets. Broken for you…

CES 2018 is a wrap. Right now everyone is returning to their normal days, nursing whatever bug they picked up from a week of frantic hand shaking across the petri dish of CES. Not only was I able to walk the show floor but we also collected every tweet and instagram post on the show. While in past years I have renamed CES as the Car Electronics Show with the heavy emphasis on Connect Car and Autonomous Vehicles, this year was dominated by Smart Home and Robotics.

Internet of Things and Artificial Intelligence Were Sprinkled Throughout All CES 2018 Social Mentions

Automotive, typically a dominant force for CES interest, fell to fifth place, even with BMW’s autonomous drift racing experience at the convention center. nVidia shifted away from a pure Automotive focus and showed off efforts in their core gaming as well as their continued leadership in Artificial Intelligence, keeping them in the top 10 most discussed brands in the show.

Virtual reality beat out Televisions and Gaming though LG’s forest of curved displays was one of the must experience booths on the show floor this year, the battle for VR/AR was more interesting to the world than bigger, curvier, 8K displays. Gaming is typically heavily tied with VR and Televisions and this year was no different with Gaming related announcements in displays, Gaming focused VR headsets and more. Drones and Smartphones rounded out the bottom of the segments that grabbed the most attention this year at CES.

Missing from list that have dominated years past were Wearables and Tablets. As these markets have matured, in the case of Tablets, and slowed, in the case of Wearables, new announcements are not driving as much attention. In many ways, this year was looking for the heroic story to drive engagement for the entire CE industry. CES is typically a tremendous array of technological “coulds” in which a few golden consumer “shoulds” are found. This year Smart Home attempted to take that prize. I’ll dive deeper on that within another blog post.

If you are interested to see how your market or your brand performed at CES this year (or even compared to last year) Argus Insights has the data. Just contact us at this link and I’d be glad to share what we know about your brands ability to grab mindshare this year from your competition.

ADT’s Pulse App has never been one of the most loved Smart Home management apps on the market. While ADT has struggled to make the app customers use to control their monitoring service better with new releases over the past few years, they have failed at every turn. Their most recent attempt was on 15 Jun 2017. In the last 6 days, ADT has received more reviews for the Pulse app than in the past year, over 2000 reviews, almost all negative.

ADT Pulse Gets Update And Over Two Thousand Grumpy Users Complaining Of Myriad Bugs Including Failure of TouchID Login.

As you can see, not only is ADT trailing behind the dominance of Vivint and Xfinity Home, but in the hearts and minds of their customers, the experience with the Pulse app went from bad to worse. What changed? What about the new version is driving ADT customers in droves to vent their frustrations at the App Store?

Attribute Funnel for ADT Pulse App showing where the new version is frustrating consumers, overwhelmingly negative commentary.

In the funnel diagram above, the red shows what percentage of the over 2000 reviews mention specific topics negatively, the tiny sliver of green is the positive mentions and the gray indicates the span of neutral topics within the reviews. Overall, consumers heap vitriol on the stability of the updates, highlighted a number of bugs. Most pointed were the complaints on the loss of login using TouchId on the iOS version of the Pulse App. Consumers also flamed ADT on connectivity issues as the system switched between LTE and WiFi networks, frustrations with frequent updates requiring repeated logins to reauthorize or rearm their ADT systems. In short, a disaster. ADT has a lot they can learn from their competitors on how to deliver a quality user experience to their customers. Given the growth in DIY and the more delightful alternatives in managed services, ADT could be in trouble in the coming months even as overall Smart Home growth is increasing.

Do you delight or disappoint your customers? Do you want to know where your competition is vulnerable to disruption? You can watch the entire Smart Home market unfold using the Argus Analyzer, our Real-Time IoT Ecosystem Intelligence tool!

Apple announced the HomePod today! Yeah! Finally Apple has a simple multiuser interface to Siri so that all of those Homekit users can engage with their Smart Home investment without whipping out the app. Except it might be too late…

Apple HomePod Announced on 5 June 2017, with availability in Dec 2017, arrives three years after Amazon Echo is launched.

Clearly meant to compete with the Amazon Echo, the HomePod is a bit late on the scene, similar to Nokia’s late response to the threat of the iPhone, something I was on the front lines of. The difference here is that Apple is the one late to the party. Amazon’s dominance in this space will be a tough nut to crack, especially with their Community Garden approach to engagement. Even though Apple has opened up Siri to developers, the momentum behind Amazon in the home assistant category is eerily similar to Apple’s domination of the Smartphone market with the launch of the iPhone in January of 2007. When we look at the mentions of Alexa vs Siri across Smart Home Device and App reviews going back to January 2016, you can see the dominance enjoyed by Amazon (to be fair, we removed all reviews of Google Home and Amazon Alexa products (including Echo, Dot and Tap) from the dataset).

Amazon Alexa mentions dominate those of Siri within Smart Home Device and App Reviews

Homekit saw a blip on the scope when the new version was announced in September of 2016 but lost out nearly 8:1 to Amazon Alexa over the holiday season. Question is, will the HomePod shift this graph? Will we see consumers clamoring in Holiday 2017 for HomePod when pricing and performance are still unknown? Priced at $349, is it worth that much for Apple fans to display their existing high end bluetooth speakers with a multiuser voice controlled DJ? Time will tell…

Apple did nail one thing. HomePod is about music first and Smart Home engagement second. This echos, pardon the pun, what we are seeing about consumer use of Google Home and Amazon Echo. Music rules the Smart Home! Plus we are also seeing an increase in demand for smart switches, sensors and lighting as these voice assistants make it easier to control these oft underlook elements of the Smart Home rather than whipping out yet another app to make sure the guest room light is off…

As with all Smart Home devices, we’ll be tracking the launch closely as December approaches. You can already see the impact of HomePod on the Smart Home narrative in our analysis of the social conversation around the market. Will Apple avoid Nokia’s fate and make a dent on Amazon’s substantial lead or will Apple become the disrupted? You can watch it unfold using the Argus Analyzer, our Real-Time IoT Ecosystem Intelligence tool!